"A child's learning is the function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher." James Coleman, 1972

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

The real story: The scheme to destroy public education

Forget the gossip.
The real story is the destruction of public education – comments on a letter to
the Chicago Tribune

Letter writer Suzanne M. Gray focused on the name-calling
but missed the point ("Where's the respect?"April 23): the scheme to
destroy public education.

Teacher Katie Osgood, quoted at the end of "CTU's Lewis calls Gov. Rauner 'the
new ISIS recruit'" (April 21), revealed
the cause of the financial crisis in Chicago Public Schools: "We're broke
because they're allowing us to be broke … And they want us to be broke, so they
can do these things to our system and claim they have no other choice."

This is a perfect example of the standard technique of
privatization described by Noam Chomsky: … defund, make sure things don't work,
people get angry, you hand it over to private capital." (Lecture,
University of Toronto, 2011).

1 comment:

Don't you get suspicious when you see complaints about "cuts" to school budgets with no numbers attached? NCES 2014 __Digest of Education Statistics__ puts the Chicago school district 2011-2012 (latest numbers) per pupil budget at $11,976.It does not take 12 years at $10,000 per pupil-year to teach a normal child to read and compute. Most vocational training occurs more effectively on the job than in a classroom. State (government, generally) provision of History, Economics, and Civics instruction is a threat to democracy, just as State operation of newspapers and broadcast news media would be.